Who’s the Nazi now?

Sympathy for the devil.

As someone who used to write newspaper columns and now tries to write blog posts at least four times a month, I can understand the tremendous pressure to come up with topics. Even a lame-ass site like this one is a hungry beast. The more gruel I shovel at it, the more it wants. Sometimes you get desperate. Yesterday I came this close to writing something about the tragic but unsurprising demise of Amy Winehouse, even though we never dated and I probably couldn’t pick a song of hers out of a random lineup of 10 other tunes. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.

Or, as I prefer to put it, I have my standards. That’s where I part company with somebody like, say, Glenn Beck. That and the size of our paychecks.

Beck, whom I used to enjoy when he used to be amusing as a hungry kid out of nowhere in Philadelphia, has now weighed in on the mass murder of Norwegian kids: Those kids — the victims — remind him of Hitler Youth. If ever a man should have searched a bit further for a topic, this was that time.

Words fail. But I’ll use them anyway: What the hell, Glenn? Has it come to this? Never mind that Nazi analogies in themselves always reveal the analogist as an idiot. When they are invoked as some feeble explanation for mass murder, the irony is not as subtle as irony should be.  Neither is the message: Glenn Beck, like Amy Winehouse before him, has betrayed whatever talent he once had. Also, he has lost his freaking mind.